Regression Is a Virtue

If you're turning the sound of black metal inside out, eviscerating the sacredly profane sound that still comes from Scandinavia, the best strategy for making new fans likely isn't to insist that you're from Norway-- especially, you know, if you're not.

But that's exactly what Sutekh Hexen did about two years ago, when its first militantly abrasive cassette made it to the internet. Sutekh Hexen emerged almost fully formed, smearing the sounds of some distant but recalcitrant rock band with the roaring wash of a natural disaster ripping through a field of microphones. If you leaned in close, with the bellicose static stabbing at dangerous volumes, you could arguably hear passable duo beating beneath the cover. But the internet begets a cynic.

Sutekh Hexen: "Isvar Savasana":

Sutekh Hexen: Isvar Savasana

"It was on MySpace. We didn't think anybody gave a shit," explains Scott Miller, a San Francisco multi-instrumentalist. After all, Sutekh Hexen was about making the harsh music they wanted to hear. They suspected it might be too harsh for everyone else, but they were wrong. "People got so mad on chat boards."

Miller's bandmat, Kevin Yuen, laughs in response: "I guess we were doing something right because, on one hand, you had people Blogspotting our cassette, while on the other hand, there were huge comment threads infuriated because of our MySpace."

If you search "Sutekh Hexen Norway," you'll still find almost all of their nearly dozen releases tagged with Norwegian origins. In their defense, Miller and Yuen soon enough revealed their actual location. While their logo reads like an indecipherable kid's plate of spaghetti noodles and their washed-in-ash album covers tend to suggest images rescued from a tomb, they actually released a press photo last year. Though they've yet to print their own names in liner notes, they have revealed the names of their collaborators and talked candidly about their process and past in interviews, removing the veil that seemed so important at the start. But ask Joe Paterno's ghost and Lana Del Rey's myth: Be it rumor or news, once something provocative hits the internet, it's almost impossible to stop.

The bigger point here is that in just two years, Sutekh Hexen have not only released more than 10 7"'s, cassettes, and LPs (with plans for several more this year already), but they've also broken most every mold they seemed to step into at the start. They truss obliterative harsh noise and bleak black metal about as well as anyone interested in that particularly au courant hybrid, yet they refute the term entirely. If they have a scene of peers, they say, they want it to comprise John Fahey, Black Sabbath, Celtic Frost, and early Fleetwood Mac LPs.

"I don't know what format we really have other than manipulating sound," says Yuen. "To be selfish, we play music we want to listen to. This is just how it comes out in our head."

Answers Miller, "I think a lot of people try to assign a tag or title to what we do. It's just jargon. But at the end of the day, it's a sound-- a sound that we enjoy, a sound that we want to hear ourselves."

The examples of shattered assumptions with Sutekh Hexen continue: Both in their 30s, Yuen and Miller had no plans to tour with this band. "I've got to feed the children upstairs," Miller explains. "Isvar Savasna" is the build-into-apocalypse opener of their latest, best and conveniently most widely available albumto date, Larvae, released by brilliant Texas upstart Handmade Birds. The piece actually served as the nightly opener on their most recent tour. And though their prolificacy and efficacy has yet to flag as a duo, Larvae marks their first release as a trio. Lee Camfield is the final piece of the trio. A tape manipulator and found-sound enthusiast who recorded Sutekh Hexen concerts as a fan before signing on to engineer and help sculpt Larvae, he adds dimension to the drama.

Larvae makes a promising series of adjustments to the band's typical template, too. Previously, every Sutekh Hexen track has been no more than a few seconds longer or shorter than five minutes. That deliberate move has been an attempt not only to overstay their welcome but to get into the brutality and out of it with maximum impact. At odds with the mindset of innumerable drone and noise composers, Miller argues that longer tracks lose too much meaning to tedium. Larvae remains almost exactly 15 minutes on one side and 15 on the other, but there are only three tracks here.

"It's so abrasive that, even for us, more than five or 10 minutes of this is excessive. It's a realistic timeframe," says Yuen. "But [with Larvae], we didn't want to do something as methodical as we had done."

Rather than wallow in its length, "Let Their Be Light," whose 15 minutes consume all of Side B, might just be the most enduring Sutekh Hexen track yet, showcasing an act with ideas that reach far beyond the constraints of their peers. At the start, an acoustic guitar trickles over a subservient electric din, the lighter elements momentarily putting the darkness at bay. A percussive shuffling suggests a muted tabla, but it's actually Camfield's field recording of a pinecone, spliced and stacked. For more than 10 minutes, this eerie calm fights shifts, sustain, and decay as samples and sinister vocals saturate the space with anxiety. Just as it all cedes to silence, Sutekh Hexen returns with one of those characteristic five-minute outbursts. They oscillate between belligerent thrash and mid-tempo stomp, the modes unified by a sheer surface of radiant noise. Considering that this is the first Sutekh Hexen release to get wide distribution, it's a righteous exit for an unapologetically demanding entrance.

"We've both done a bunch of ambient noise projects and metal projects over the year. We just wanted to do something blown-out and more abrasive," explains Yuen. "This band has gone in directions we never expected." --Grayson Currin